At the End
by cntrl15
Summary: Based on the original Arthurian legends. Even to the end, honour binds.


Inside the helm is always quiet.

Outside is different. Is different every time. A town cheering together. Jeers and curses. The groans of dying men. Children playing past the lists. Horns. The legio still roaring commands. Tower bells ringing midday. Saracens raving final prayers. Goshawks and squires.

Today is different. Those who chose to watch are few, and silent. The rain is loud as it pings off his spaulders and splashes thick against the fresh mud beneath him. Crows are shrieking beneath the pennant boards and a mason's man is heaving the last of his load up the wall. The world is loud today in the way a man's own breath is loud to his ears.

He allows himself an early glance across the lists, and is surprised by what he sees. This span of ground has been his world for the better part of a century. He knows this rail better than he knows his own bedroom. He can recall how the stands, the sky, and the ground have framed every target he's ridden at since he was old enough to hold a stick and tilt at rings. The step and angle of each mount, the height and breadth of each shield. The man he finds there now defies his memories. He has never seen a foe so defeated. He sees now, can accept, that when the ride is over he will have lost. But the man across the way, bent like all the titan's ponderous load is laid fresh across his back, that man is already on the ground. Already in the mud, though his lance and his greaves and his horse don't know it yet. The sight is wrong in his eyes; that man, sitting that way. Impossible. He bows his head downwards, away, and pulls on his helm.

He settles in the saddle, brings his eyes up, and once more the world is quiet. No matter where or why, who for or against, this quiet is always the same. This is the same quiet he finds when he returns to the green pine glades of his youth, far and away across the sea. The same quiet that greets him when he tilts his head back and the sun answers dappled and bright from so high above. The very same quiet he remembers from the green fields of Cornwall and the empty sands of Pontus and the dry reaches of Moorish lands too old for him to name. This is the sound of the whole world beneath him, the sound of laughter at midnight, the sound of a woman loved.

He touches heels to horse, rolls his knees forwards, sets his shield against his shoulder. He lets go.

There is little now for him to do in the lists, beyond riding and watching. He sits as his mount suggests and aims by direction of his lance. Beyond these things he is done doing; has been doing for fifty-seven years. Some men wish that they could have done as he had, that they might have had the strength or will to train as he trained. They are wrong. He hasn't trained. He has lived and breathed and dreamed for one thing, for these thirty paces. He has burned and cried and bled and done all the lance ever asked of him. Now they ride hand in hand, the one leading the other.

So thirty paces becomes twenty-five and twenty. Fifteen and ten before he sees her, clambering out of the stands and onto the strip of meadow beside the lists. The officiators from the court are baffled, milling at the edge of the stand behind her and trying lure her back under shelter. She doesn't acknowledge them, won't turn away even to force them away. She's older now, old, but even in the grey half-light her eyes have the same wild power they always did. Her hair lost its fire ten years ago and her dress is soaked with mud and rain, but her neck is still unbowed and she holds her head just as high.

She is as beautiful now as she was at two-and-twenty, when she sat the throne and kings of half-a-hundred nations pledged themselves to her name.

He sees her looking between them, eyes blazing at the wrong of it all, darting from him to the man across the rail to the center of the lists where their collision approaches. He can see the terrible sorrow written across her brows and the raging fire still burning in the twist of her lips. He catches her eyes narrow in the way they do when she finds something she knows to be true, when she_ finds herself_ fighting for the world to be simple and right. He has time to hope that she will stay silent. Time enough to turn away and believe that the clopping of hooves and the thrum of steel on steel will be loud enough to drown her out. He knows that what he hears will break him, that it would be better in a thousand ways not to know.

She whispers, with anger and longing and desolate hope and not a hair of regret, and inside the helm her voice is clear as the word of god.

"Lancelot"

* * *

Whew.

There it is, finally out after a ridiculously long time spent lost in trash.

First of all I have to give props to Paul Gadzikowski's "Arthur: King of Time and Space" for inspiring this and being mind-blowingly amazing. Go check it out.

Next, a few clarifications on the personal headcanon behind this story: Lancelot and Guinevere's affair has just been revealed to the court. Arthur, bound by law, chooses to tilt against Lancelot in single combat rather than subject Lancelot and Guinevere to trial, sentencing, and execution. Lancelot must accept, and knowing that he can best Arthur chooses to die to him instead, bound by his sense of honour and guilt. At the end, Lancelot would rather not know who, of him and Arthur, Guinevere loved more. If she cries out to him he will regret love lost for the rest of his days, and if she cries out to the king Lancelot's guilt for betraying his friend will only grow harder to bear.

If you were confused at all I hope this clears things up, and that you enjoy it more if you read again.

As ever, reviews are appreciated.


End file.
